Living in a World Where Your Appliances Spy on You

You are fast asleep in the middle of the night, when suddenly you hear the voice of a strange man talking to your baby daughter… from inside her room.

You jump up and rush in there to find that, other than your infant sleeping in her crib, no one is there.

Then you hear him again, screaming, “Wake up, baby! Wake up!”

You focus on the source of the sound — your WI-FI baby monitor camera, which suddenly turns its lens on you without your prompt, so whoever has hacked it can scream obscenities at you in your own home in the middle of the night.

That’s what happened to one Cincinnati, Ohio couple just last week according to WBTV FOX19:

“Someone had hacked in from outside,” Heather said.

So how many other times had someone hacked into their camera and watched their baby through their Foscam IP Camera.

“You do kind of feel violated in a way,” Adam said.

According to tech experts, wireless IP cameras like the one the Shrieks have are an easy way for hackers to open a cyber door directly into your home.

“Any kind of Internet-connected device essentially could be subjected to this,” said Dave Hatter, a solutions expert for Infinity Partners.

And experts say once they get inside the camera in your home, hackers may also be able to get inside your lives.

They go on to recommend changing your password and making sure your software is up-to-date, but that’s it? Is that really going to make these parents feel safer about having a WI-FI, smartphone camera trained on their daughter?

The takeaway is, if you can use it to spy on your child, it can be used to spy on you. The same goes with all this “smart” technology.

And if you think it’s just hackers randomly spying on people this way here and there, think again. It’s corporations. It’s the government. It’s the government in consort with corporations.

Last fall, LG Electronics was caught sending data about its customers viewing habits on several of its “smart TV” models to a company in South Korea — even after one customer changed his privacy setting to “off,” supposedly disabling the TVs ability for “collection of watching info” in the options menu (it is a creepy enough sign of the times that this “option” comes standard anyway).

The company later released an apology statement.

ABC News also released a list of the nine household appliances that might be spying on you: on your habits, on your usage, on the minutia of your daily life:

Your TV (obviously)

Your Cable Box

Your Dishwasher, Clothes Dryer, Toaster, Clock Radio and Remote Control

Your Lights

Your Heat and Air Conditioning

Security Alarms

Insulin Pumps and Pacemakers

Smartphones

Your Tablet and Computer

(They obviously miscounted, but still.)

And Back to the Future promised us hover boards…

Last Spring Wired reported that former CIA Director David Patraeus could hardly wait to spy on people through their appliances when he was discussing how this is all a part of the coming “Internet of Things” — a future where everything is technologically connected to everything else:

“Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters — all connected to the next-generation internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing,” Petraeus said, “the latter now going to cloud computing, in many areas greater and greater supercomputing, and, ultimately, heading to quantum computing.”

Petraeus allowed that these household spy devices “change our notions of secrecy” and prompt a rethink of “our notions of identity and secrecy.” All of which is true — if convenient for a CIA director.

Why do you think the NSA built a $3 billion data hub in the Utah desert?

Aaron and Melissa Dykes (formerly Melton) created Truthstream Media to figure out what in the hell is really going on around here.

Co-founder of Truthstream Media, Aaron Dykes is an investigative researcher and video creator with over a decade of experience in uncovering the secretive and often nefarious that gravitates around power. Together with his wife Melissa Dykes, Aaron has traveled across the country in search of threads tied to political intrigue, black ops, military industrial complex, the weaponization of science, a hidden history of eugenics and population control, unethical human experimentation and the quest to control the physical mind that remains ongoing and little known. Aaron has been part of hundreds of videos and interviews on a variety of important topics across the spectrum of geopolitics and conspiracy, news and olds.

Melissa Dykes is the other co-founder of Truthstream Media, and a passionate and witty voice for common sense and sanity in a world plagued by lies, corruption and deep conspiracies that has patched over reality and left a world of naive and helplessly herded people lost in technology, and cut off from their own history. She has focused her investigative research and video production on issues ranging from health and safety in smart meters, EMF, ersatz food, cell towers and other modern environmental concerns, to the dark underbelly of covert experimentation, CIA plots, secret infrastructure and the organized and systematic control over the minds of the population. Melissa has written dozens of articles, edited and produced countless videos, and several documentary projects in the hopes of shining a light in the right places.

Help Us Fund TSM!

TSM is also a participant in the Amazon Services Associates Program, an affiliate program designed to provide a means for sites to earn a small referral fee by advertising and linking to products discussed in our articles up on Amazon.com. It's not an additional charge, it's just another way for TSM to support itself by adding Amazon links when we discuss books or movies you might wanna check out... You can also CLICK THIS LINK when you shop at Amazon to support us!